'The Merger': Columbia College combines creative writing programs

Aleksandar Hemon signed on as the writer-in-residence at Columbia College Chicago, which recently integrated genres for a unified creative writing department.

Aleksandar Hemon signed on as the writer-in-residence at Columbia College Chicago, which recently integrated genres for a unified creative writing department. (Kevin Nance photo)

Kevin Nance

Columbia College merges its creative writing programs into one big multi-genre family

Columbia College has always loomed large on the Chicago literary scene, primarily through its annual Story Week festival, which brought blue-chip authors to town for readings and seminars. Now — although Story Week has been discontinued and replaced with a new reading series — the college is staking an aggressive claim for itself as the city's best creative writing program with a high-profile faculty appointment and a newly streamlined structure that removes barriers between genres. The college recently announced Aleksandar Hemon, the acclaimed Chicago novelist, essayist and MacArthur fellow, as its new writer-in-residence.

In snagging Hemon — a Bosnian-American whose works include the essay collection "The Book of My Lives" (2013) and such novels as "The Lazarus Project" (2008) and "Nowhere Man" (2002), all finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award — Columbia has pulled off "a literary coup d'etat," says associate professor Sam Weller, who chairs the school's MFA program. "Any school in the country would probably want him on their faculty, and so for us to bring him in really bolsters our all-star cast."

But the most seismic shift is the recent restructuring, which has merged the college's fiction-writing program — for many years its own separate entity — with the nonfiction and poetry programs into a single, unified creative writing department.

While the significance of "The Merger," as it's called in-house, may be opaque to outsiders, it's profound in the halls of the college's downtown Chicago campus. No longer restrained by the relatively strict barriers between the genres that once kept them largely cordoned off into their own disciplines, creative writing students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels can now float freely from classes in fiction to nonfiction to poetry and back again, diversifying the learning process along the way.

"As it was before, a student in fiction wouldn't necessarily engage a student in poetry or nonfiction, because they were living in their own bubbles, so to speak," says associate professor Matthew Shenoda, who was the interim chairman of the new department for its first two years before handing it off this fall to colleague Tony Trigilio. (A national search for a permanent chairman is under way.) "But at the undergraduate level in particular, sticking exclusively with a specific genre is often not the best thing for students," Shenoda says. "They're still quite young, exploring writing, and may find themselves attracted to multiple genres. They're discovering their identities as writers, not necessarily as just poets or just fiction writers, and the synergy of the new department allows that to happen much more fluidly."

"When we were in two separate departments, it was hard to get the students mingling in the classes — not because that was something the students didn't want, but because you had to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to make it happen," Trigilio adds. "Now it's just a question of, 'Do we have open seats? OK, you're in.'"

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To lay the groundwork for the new cross-genre landscape in the creative writing department, all incoming students are required to take a "foundations" course in which they spend five weeks on each of the three genres — fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The idea is that while each genre has its own particular requirements, some lessons of each genre can be applied, often in surprising ways, to the other two. The same process is happening in more advanced classes, with prose-writing students bringing fresh insight to their classmates in poetry and vice versa.

"I taught a class in biography and memoir, with students from both fiction and nonfiction; what they taught each other was probably more relevant than what I taught them," Weller says. "The fiction students bring what they know about story and narrative structure, and the nonfiction students bring things (such as research techniques) that fiction writers can use."

Kevin Nance photo

Matthew Shenoda, associate professor and former interim chairman of the new department at COlumbia.

Matthew Shenoda, associate professor and former interim chairman of the new department at COlumbia. (Kevin Nance photo)

The cross-fertilization happens every day. "This one student looked at one of my stories and was concentrating on the way certain words sounded when they were strung together," says Courtney Zellars, an MFA candidate in fiction. "As a poet, she was looking at words a lot closer than I do as a fiction student. I'm thinking about how this phrase advances the story, but she's looking at the rhythm of it, the music of it, which was very unique. That's not the type of feedback I would get in a workshop with just other fiction writers in it. And now I'm considering that — the sound of the words — when I write."

Jan-Henry Gray, an MFA candidate in poetry, encountered a similar sort of across-the-aisle inspiration. "There was a fiction student in our poetry seminar last semester who, on the first day of class, said that poetry made her really nervous," Gray recalls. "But I learned so much from her because she was so appropriately naive about poetry. She didn't have hang-ups or preconceived notions about what poetry was. She had such a fresh take."

Associate professor Jenny Boully, who concentrates on teaching nonfiction, is all for the new porousness between the genres. "It's almost as if we're looking at one art — the art of writing — and how language can make something crafted, something beautiful, in any genre," she says. "Of course there are always going to be divides between the genres, but now we all have this common core principle of we're making art out of language, whatever the genre. We're all just writers."

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The shift from the old, established structure — with fiction writing in its silo in Columbia's School of Fine and Performing Arts, and nonfiction and poetry housed in the School of Liberal Arts under the Department of English — was not accomplished without strain.

Plans for the merger began to take shape in 2012, during a troubled period when the administration initiated a restructuring process called "prioritization," which included wrenching changes in several popular programs. One of those changes was the widely reported decision not to renew the contract of Randall Albers, a beloved faculty member, as chair of the fiction writing department. (That decision was later reversed, and Albers, a disciple of the Story Workshop method of teaching, continued as chair until the merger became official. He retired this year.) The shift to a unified creative writing department — a structure that more closely resembled most creative writing programs at colleges and universities around the country — largely occurred independently of the prioritization process, according to college spokeswoman Cara Birch, but the uproar over Albers didn't make the transition any easier.

"Was there resistance? Absolutely," Shenoda says. "Change in academe is very slow, and people get very comfortable. It's very difficult to get people to shift their thinking, but it needed to happen."

Associate professor Joe Meno, a novelist ("Marvel and a Wonder," "Hairstyles of the Damned") and Columbia College alumnus, continues to revere Story Workshop — pioneered in the 1960s by John Schultz, an emeritus professor at Columbia — and remains close to Albers. But he agrees that the new departmental structure is more beneficial for students in an interdisciplinary era when professional writers need to master multiple genres rather than just one.

"Being adaptable as a writer in the 21st century is incredibly important," says Meno, who is now associate chair of the new department. "Looking at my own professional life, I was a music journalist for a long time, interviewing bands, which ended up influencing a lot of my fiction. I also wrote plays and poetry. By writing poetry, I learned about compression and timing, the use of white space, all kinds of things. And you know, we have to look at what students need to succeed in the marketplace today. They're paying a lot of money — or their parents are, or they're taking out loans — to be here, and this is the best way we can serve them."

His colleague Nami Mun, a fiction writer, agrees that adapting to the needs of the contemporary literary scene requires flexibility and the ability to react quickly to trends. "There are certain topics, such as fabulism — fiction about strange worlds inhabited by realistic, authentic characters — that have become very popular these days," Mun says. "The students have said they want to know more about that, so we've moved quickly to include it in the curriculum."

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Another recently conceived class that Mun teaches is called "The Art of Violence." "It's a very relevant topic right now, unfortunately," she says. "But young writers need to understand the ways in which violence — physical or psychological — can be portrayed in literature and the ways in which the author can exploit it, perhaps, or make it into a transcendental moment. This is the era in which we live, so it has to be discussed."

This may be true particularly at Columbia, whose student body is highly diverse and whose campus is not separated from the larger world but, rather, integrated with it to extraordinary degree.

"The urban profile of Columbia is very important," Hemon says. "The students here are people who live in the city, engage with the city. It's not like the traditional university campus, which is monastic, in a way — where you remove yourself from the world in order to study, and where you're protected from all kinds of things. It would be difficult for me to live in a university town, however beautiful. It's a matter of creative principle — the idea of continuous engagement with the world. It doesn't cease while you're writing. It's ongoing. You shouldn't have to pass through a meadow to get to the real world."

A version of this article appeared in print on November 22, 2015, in the Printers Row section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Breaking down the walls - Columbia College's creative writing program is now one big, multi-genre family" —
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